from the apart-from-here-of-course! dept

The news industry has been in an ongoing state of upheaval ever since the dawn of the internet. In addition to the many ways that technology changes reporting and publishing, there has also been a profound effect on how people find their news. This week, we step away from the big debate about echo chambers and filter bubbles, and talk about evolving news-finding habits and what they mean for the industry.

from the does-it-matter? dept

I've already argued that the rush to point fingers at Facebook for allowing lots of fake news to get passed around is greatly overhyped by people searching for explanations for last week's election results. That doesn't mean that people shouldn't be looking to do something about fake news on various platforms. On Monday, Google also faced some controversy over fake news, when its top result for people searching for "final election results" pointed to a fake news site with made up numbers. In response, a few hours later, Google announced that it was going to start banning fake news sites from using Google's AdSense ad product. A few hours after that, Facebook announced a similar pledge to stop allowing those sites to make money from Facebook.

This leads to a few different thoughts: lessening the power of totally fake news sites is certainly a good idea. And cutting off conventional ad revenue paths might be at least somewhat effective in the short term. After all, recent reports have shown that many of the fake news sites were set up by people overseas in a pure arbitrage play to cash in on the easy ad revenue by finding lots of gullible Americans.

The young Macedonians who run these sites say they don’t care about Donald Trump. They are responding to straightforward economic incentives: As Facebook regularly reveals in earnings reports, a US Facebook user is worth about four times a user outside the US. The fraction-of-a-penny-per-click of US display advertising — a declining market for American publishers — goes a long way in Veles. Several teens and young men who run these sites told BuzzFeed News that they learned the best way to generate traffic is to get their politics stories to spread on Facebook — and the best way to generate shares on Facebook is to publish sensationalist and often false content that caters to Trump supporters.

[....]

“I started the site for a easy way to make money,” said a 17-year-old who runs a site with four other people. “In Macedonia the economy is very weak and teenagers are not allowed to work, so we need to find creative ways to make some money. I’m a musician but I can’t afford music gear. Here in Macedonia the revenue from a small site is enough to afford many things.”

Of course, this raises lots of other questions. If Facebook can figure out which sites are "fake" news sites, then, um, why doesn't it also adjust its algorithm to either highlight that those are fake news sites or to simply not promote those stories in feeds quite so much? But there are a number of other issues here. Sure, for the purely fake news sites, perhaps this makes sense, but who's determining what sites are "fake" and what's not. Because while it sounds like a black and white kind of thing, that discussion can get fuzzy pretty damn quick. After all, some of the sites that have been discussed publish a mixture of fake and real news. And sometimes "real" publications get tricked and publish fake news too. Remember, just a few weeks ago, Rolling Stone lost a lawsuit for publishing what was basically a fake news story. And, of course, you'll have opinionated partisans on all sides arguing that this or that publication is "fake." We see it all the time when people yell at us for linking to certain websites that haters insist are propaganda for one or the other political parties. Where do these companies draw the line?

Another problem is that while Google and Facebook may dominate the ad business, they're hardly the only ones. Hell, we get emails basically every day from new ad networks looking to put ads on Techdirt. Many of them seem dubious, but do kids in Macedonia running fake Trump stories care about how dubious the ad networks are? If they get paid, they'll use them.

Finally, while cutting off ad revenue from these sites isn't a horrible idea, it does seem to avoid the actual issue which is how so many people are absolutely terrible news consumers. And, yes, you are too. Everyone is at some point. A story just seems too good to be true, or that fits with your world view, and of course you're going to share it, because that's what we've all been conditioned to do. What would be great was if there was a way to actually train people to be better news consumers -- to actually take the time to learn what's happening and what's really going on -- but that seems like it's just wishful thinking these days.

from the trash-talking dept

It's always the people neck deep in partisanship that make the most noise about unfairness. In a move that bodes well for free speech, Rep. Kevin Cramer is calling for hearings to sort out this "problem" with "biased" media. Cramer also spent some time as Donald Trump's energy advisor, so it's a good guess he feels his candidate hasn't been treated fairly by The Liberal Media™ -- an entity that's always useful for easy scapegoating when things go south for candidates, legislation, etc. on the Republican side. (The liberals/left do the same when stuff goes wrong for them. Everyone does it. The only difference is the scapegoat.)

Rep. Kevin Cramer (R-N.D.) sent a letter to the heads of the four "major" TV networks—CBS, NBC, ABC, and Fox—threatening to hold a hearing "to explore network media bias in coverage of the 2016 presidential campaign." To justify this grandstanding and overreaching display of concerned government, Cramer cites a recent Gallup poll which put Americans trust in "media" at around 32 percent and also asserted only 37 percent of Americans think the media's coverage of the 2016 campaign has been "balanced."

Cramer's biases are clear, but he seems blissfully unaware of them. Presumably Fox is being added to this hearing's lineup for the same reason criminal informants get swept up during law enforcement raids -- to prevent any suspicion arising from its exclusion. While Cramer cited the Gallup poll, he also added in more feelings of his own, stating the media (both sides, I guess) is engaged in "surreptitious propaganda" which somehow violates its "moral" duty to inform the public without taking sides.

Rather than allow adults to address the open question of "moral" obligations, Cramer has issued threats with the weight of the federal government behind them. He brought up the Fairness Doctrine, only to drop it moments later, stating that a "free system" is only possible with unbiased media.

Media bias is something universally hated, but it's never not a partisan issue. Everyone agrees bias -- at least too much of it -- is bad. Those wanting to see it gone usually just want the other side to change, not the ones that confirm their world view. Rep. Cramer is no different, and seeing as he has somewhat of a vested interest in Trump's success, his official offendedness is incredibly suspect.

Hearings aren't the only thing Cramer threatened. He also hinted he would start pulling FCC licenses if things didn't change while implying that the First Amendment is mostly for protecting speech he likes.

So instead of wielding the Fairness Doctrine as a means of forcing the networks to rid themselves of all political bias (which would be impossible to quantify, not least because bias is in the eye of the beholder), Cramer threatens their "the use of federally-allocated spectrum" afforded by their FCC licenses, writing "Your FCC license and the liberty that comes with your First Amendment rights are not a license to broadcast anything you want or in any way you choose."

That's an odd interpretation of the First Amendment. There are very few modes of expression that aren't protected by it and "always running down my guy" isn't one of those exceptions. Not that it matters. As Reason's Anthony Fisher points out, Cramer's more angry than informed.

Cramer appears to have not read the FCC's website, which explicitly states (emphasis theirs), "We license only individual broadcast stations. We do not license TV or radio networks (such as CBS, NBC, ABC or Fox) or other organizations with which stations have relationships (such as PBS or NPR), except to the extent that those entities may also be station licensees."

[...]

Though Cramer might want to use the FCC as his own task force, the FCC's website also states the commission "cannot prevent the broadcast of any particular point of view. In this regard, the Commission has observed that 'the public interest is best served by permitting free expression of views."

So, the FCC won't be doing any of the things Cramer imagines he can make it do, and any attempt to force the issue would look exactly like what it is: an attack on free speech disguised as a call for "fairness."

Bias will always exist in the media. That's because humans are biased creatures and some of it bleeds over into the profession, no matter how much they might aspire to loftier ideals. And, of course, there are always those who don't even aspire to these ideals and wallow in fully-biased reporting.

But it's not as if dragging down the Big Four to Cramer's level would have much of an impact immediately, much less a lasting one. Only a small minority of Americans get their news exclusively from these outlets. Many more get them from a variety of other sources, all with their own preferences and biases. And humans, being humans, tend to be drawn to viewpoints that agree with their own. Hollering about FCC license and moral obligations won't do anything to make the news more fair -- not when there's a market on both sides of the political aisle hungering for a slant that agrees with their own.

from the hmmmm dept

Amidst the reporting and fervor over the email hack of Hillary Clinton's campaign chairman, John Podesta, there has been something of a recent discussion that has begun over the ethics of circulating what is in that hacked cache. Some within the media itself have worried about about reporting either too much on the hacked emails, or even at all in some cases, with still others going for a more nuanced position of encouraging the reporting of information in the public interest while leaving all the personal stuff in the emails undisclosed to whatever degree is possible.

I don’t fault anyone for reporting real news, whatever the source, but circulating stuff from hacked emails just b/c it amuses you is gross.

It's not difficult to see the wisdom and morality in some of this, particularly when one witnesses the glee the Clinton campaign's political opponents have taken in circulating internal communications within the campaign that have no real public value other than serving as a point-and-laugh target for the most partisan among us. And it seems as though some in the GOP have in mind that there are certainly people on the other side of the aisle that would take the same joy in all of this, if the shoe were on the other hacked foot, as it were. Marco Rubio, for instance, recently released a statement indicating that anything published by WikiLeaks was out of bounds, as far as he was concerned.

"Today it is the Democrats. Tomorrow, it could be us," Rubio said in a statement. "I will not discuss any issue that has become public solely on the basis of WikiLeaks," added Rubio, who is up for re-election. "As our intelligence agencies have said, these leaks are an effort by a foreign government to interfere with our electoral process, and I will not indulge in it."

Frankly, it's refreshing to see a major political partisan actually understand that when you open up every option on the table to attack the political opponent, that can come back and bite you in the ass. But how wise is this particular stance, actually? It appears to rely on two premises: that Russia is behind the email hack and that WikiLeaks is a bad organization for releasing the information it releases. Note that Rubio doesn't say that this particular email hack is out of bounds, but rather that any issue raised as a result of a WikiLeaks release is. That's a hefty barrel of sand in which to put one's head in such a proactive fashion, and it presupposes that WikiLeaks' releases in the past, present, and future have not involved anything of the public interest which politicians and public servants should be talking about and/or addressing.

Time Magazine once said WikiLeaks "could become the most important journalistic tool since the Freedom of Information Act." Why? Well, because the value in WikiLeaks is that it knows far fewer boundaries than the general media and is willing to release information that would otherwise not see the light of day. That it tends to do so en masse rather than with careful curation is a potential downside, certainly, but would Rubio and these others really have the public not know about the killing of journalists in Iraq, the Chinese arrests of Tibetan dissidents, the Peru oil scandal, and the rest? WikiLeaks is not explicitly anti-American, after all, and it has released information that is absolutely in the public interest and has caused discussions of political importance within our country that would have otherwise been impossible.

Put another way, it's quite easy for Rubio to take this stance in the wake of an email hack that represents a fairly routine political scandal. What has been uncovered in the Podesta leaks is not unimportant, but it also isn't earth-shattering. What if the hack and WikiLeaks leak had instead uncovered that Hillary Clinton had made a specific agreement with the Chinese government to offer them favors in exchange for illegal campaign contributions? Would Rubio's stance hold true, despite the overwhelming importance of such information to American voters. It's hard to imagine that it would.

So, a nuanced approach to what should be reported on the WikiLeaks release makes all the sense in the world. Let's have that discussion. But putting a blanket over any information generated by WikiLeaks as an organization isn't just dumb, it's cutting out an important source of public good from the masses.

Indeed, it seems that as newspaper revenue has declined, screaming newspaper reporters have been looking for a "dot com" to blame, every step of the way, rather than looking inwardly at their own failures to adapt to a changing marketplace. I remember, not too long ago, when it wasn't Facebook that was killing the news business, but Craigslist. I mean, everyone said it was true:

And, of course, after it was all Craigslist's fault, it was, undoubtedly, the fault of Google and its Google News product. That's why Europe is so busy trying to force Google to pay for newspapers that it links to. And, of course, once again, lots of media folks jumped on the blame Google bandwagon:

A few notes on some of the above links. The "study" that is cited in some of the first batch about how Craigslist is "killing" newspapers was from the Pew Research Center -- the very same research shop that Greenslade points to in the link up at the top of this article blaming Facebook. Second, that first article in the second list, about Bob Woodward blaming Google... is also by Greenslade. Yet, in that case, Greenslade mocks Woodward for blaming Google (and very kindly provides a link to me mocking Woodward's silly claims.

So let's get a few things out of the way here: Newspapers are struggling. They absolutely are. But it's not "because" of Facebook (or Craigslist or Google). Newspapers were going to struggle with the rise of the internet no matter what, because it laid bare the basic coincidence that made newspapers profitable despite themselves. For many, many years, we've been pointing out that the true business of newspapers was a community business, rather than a news business. It's just that in the pre-internet days, newspapers had a bit of a monopoly on being able to build communities -- often local communities -- around the news. But they had very little competition in that business, other than maybe a few other local newspapers (though consolidation took care of that in most markets). The business, then, of newspapers was taking the attention they received from that community, and selling it to advertisers.

The internet structurally changed all of this, by creating all sorts of other areas where people could congregate and build communities. That's kind of what the internet is good at. And suddenly there's a ton of competition in the community space. But newspapers, incorrectly thinking they were in the "news" business, often made decisions that actively harmed the community aspect. They put up paywalls. They took away the ability to comment. They made it harder for local communities of interest to form.

So what happened? The communities and their (valuable) attention went elsewhere. And, these days, much of that "elsewhere" when it comes to communities is Facebook.

And, just like Google before it, Facebook has actually created a pretty valuable channel for sending people to your news website. Many publishers haven't figured this out yet -- or how to harness it. Hell, just a month or so ago, I was talking about how we here at Techdirt haven't figured this out at all (we get depressingly little traffic from Facebook compared to many of our peers). But you won't see us blaming Facebook for this. It's on us. Have our ad rates dropped off a cliff? Yes. Is that Facebook's fault? Hell no. Even if all the advertising money that used to go to newspapers and news sites magically shifted to Facebook (which it hasn't), then it would be because of a failure on the part of those news companies to offer a better overall product for advertisers.

It's time for publications to stop blaming every new technology site that comes along, and to focus on actually adapting, changing and finding new business models that work. It may not be easy. And many will crash and burn completely. But that's not the "fault" of these new companies at all.

from the all-about-the-money dept

Another day, another case of copyright being used to lock up information, rather than make it more accessible. In this case, it's the news archives of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel, according to an interesting piece by Henry Grabar over at Slate. A decade or so ago, the newspaper partnered with Google to digitize all of its archives and make them publicly accessible.

The archive had initially been made available on Google around 2008 as part of the company’s effort to digitize historical newspapers. That project ended in 2011, but not before Google had scanned more than 60 million pages covering 250 years of history’s first drafts. Those newspapers have remained publicly accessible, and serve both professional historians and home genealogists.

When the Milwaukee project began, Google used microfilms from the papers that had already been uploaded to the ProQuest research database. Because some things were missing from ProQuest, the Journal-Sentinelasked the Milwaukee Public Library to help out. The library let the company digitize decades of microfilms to bulk out the digital archives.

The article notes that another company, named Newsbank, also has a deal with the Journal-Sentinel to digitize and archive its papers, and tried to get the Milwaukee Public Library to buy access to its database. The library found the offerings way too expensive (it was almost the entire amount of the library's materials budget). Newsbank decided that part of the problem was that the stuff was also available for free via Google, so it got the Journal-Sentinel to get Google to take down the archive that it had helped create, with help from the library.

Then, in August, Newsbank let the other shoe drop: According to Urban Milwaukee, Gannett—which purchased the paper in April—asked the Journal-Sentinel to ask Google to remove the paper’s digital archives, which the company did. It’s harder to sell a product when it’s being given away for free, after all.

So now the digital archive that the Milwaukee Public Library had helped Google and the Journal-Sentinel create, is no longer available, because another company wants the MPL to pay a significant percentage of its operating budget to access the same material.

What’s different about Milwaukee is that the city is being asked to buy back something it already had—and, in the case of the library’s digital scans, had even helped build.

The library has said that it plans to have the new archive available for people soon -- but it likely won't be free any more. Perhaps because it now needs to pay to get access to the same database it had helped create. Remember when copyright law was supposed to be about furthering knowledge and learning -- and not locking it up so that one company could extract all profit from it?

from the shocking,-there dept

For many years, while some journalists (and newspaper execs) have been insisting that a paywall is "the answer" for the declining news business, we've been pointing out how fundamentally stupid paywalls are for the news. Without going into all of the arguments again, the short version is this: the business of newspapers has never really been "the news business" (no matter how much they insist otherwise). It's always been the community and attention business. And in the past they were able to command such attention and build a community around news because they didn't have much competition. But the competitive landscape for community and attention has changed (massively) thanks to the internet. And putting up a paywall makes it worse. In most cases, it's limiting the ability of these newspapers to build communities or get attention, and actively pushing people away.

And, yes, sure, people will point to the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times as proof that "paywalls work." But earth to basically every other publication: you're not one of those publications. The paywalls there only work because of the unique content they have, and even then they don't work as well as most people think.

Of the paywalls erected in the past few years, many have delivered lackluster results, said Ken Doctor, a media consultant who writes the blog Newsonomics.

"The ones that were launched in 2012 to 2014 had good early results and they all largely stalled," he said.

"They are no longer gaining much in the way of new digital subscriptions, and their print is in rapid decline."

The article also quotes Alan Mutter who has been pointing out the fallacies around newspaper paywalls for probably longer than I have:

Paywalls can backfire also "because they put a barrier between the newspaper and the casual reader," he added.

"They are truncating the size of the digital market, when the most important factor for digital is scale."

Meanwhile, as newspapers are realizing this, even the "successful" paywall folks at the Wall Street Journal appear to be changing up its paywall to make it easier for non-paying users to read the articles.

This doesn't mean that you can't get money from readers -- but paywalls are a stupid way to do it. You're asking them to pay for the same kind of value that they can often get elsewhere. That's dumb. If you're charging, you should be charging for unique value and something different that only your publication can provide. General interest news is not that.

from the fair-use-clarification-please dept

There are two subjects we write about frequently on Techdirt that we didn't think would ever have all that much overlap: copyright and people using their mobile phones to record events in real time. This can cover a lot of stuff, but lately it's been getting extra attention in the world of police shootings and police protests. We didn't necessarily think these two kinds of stories would overlap very often, but when you've got video, you've got copyright. Last year, for example, there was a bit of a copyright dustup when the guy who shot the infamous video of Walter Scott being shot in the back by police officer Michael Slager, started demanding to get paid. As we pointed out at the time, news programs using the video were almost certainly protected by fair use.

And that's still true. But... eventually this is going to go to courts. And that's especially true because of the new group of middlemen who are racing to buy up any viral video within hours (or minutes!) of it going viral, and then trying to license it everywhere. If you follow the space, you may have heard of some of these guys: Jukin Media is the most well-known, but there are others like ViralHog, ViralNova and Newsflare. And they don't seem all that thrilled about this part of the law called fair use.

The problem, though, is that there are no cases dealing with the monetization of viral videos that depict serious news.

"Will someone challenge them? That's to be seen," said Emily Campbell, who leads the trademark and copyright group at Dunlap Codding in Oklahoma. "Will someone challenge these groups who are monetizing viral videos?"

The big differences here as compared to in the past are twofold: first, now that everyone has a device with a camera in their pockets, we're seeing a lot more viral videos, so there are a lot more situations popping up that may lead to a legal challenge. The second, and more important, is the fact that there are these viral video licensing chop shops, which are proving that there's a monetary value to these videos, which could complicate the fair use calculation a bit (since one of the four factors is the impact on the market of the use).

The most on point case is probably a copyright case from 1968 about the famous Zapruder film of the John F. Kennedy Assassination. The backstory here is fairly long and complex*, but Time Life at one point sorta had the copyright on the film, and sued Josiah Thompson for his book Six Seconds In Dallas that used an artist's rendition of some scenes from the Zapruder film. In that case, Time Inc. v. Bernard Geis Assocs, the district court ruled that it was fair use. So that's a point for fair use, but the details are still a bit different (it was a book that used artistic renderings of the film, for one). It was also just a district court ruling... and under the 1909 Copyright Act, rather than the more modern 1976 Copyright Act that we live under today).

I still think there's a strong fair use case for news programs using mobile phone videos. But, you know this is going to go to court eventually. These viral video companies are already making noises like traditional copyright maximalists, in which they ignore fair use and pretend copyright gives them full control over the work:

ViralHog founder Ryan Bartholomew, on the other hand, says the law is clear. "Whether a video is of a funny cat or a tragic event, the videographer owns their work and is entitled to control it," he told Fortune in July. "A viral video will always be monetized by someone, and representation can ensure a video's owner reaps the benefits rather than those who steal it."

And thus... it won't be long until one of these police shooting videos, or other viral videos of a newsworthy event, ends up in court. Hopefully fair use wins out. But, as we've seen over the years, fair use can be kind of a crapshoot when it comes to how judges feel about things.

* I couldn't come up with a way to fit this directly into the story above, but in that link there's the following amazing story about how CBS almost got it hands on the Zapruder film, which would have... made for an interesting legal test case had it happened:

Before Life had acquired rights to the film, CBS News’s Dallas bureau chief, a young Dan Rather, had informed 60 Minutes executive producer Don Hewitt that “a guy named Zapruder was supposed to have film of the assassination and was going to put it up for sale.” The best approach to acquiring the film, Hewitt decided quickly, was a bit more violence. “In my desire to get a hold of what was probably the most dramatic piece of news footage ever shot,” Hewett wrote, “I told Rather to go to Zapruder’s house, sock him in the jaw, take his film to our affiliate in Dallas, copy it onto videotape, and let the CBS lawyers decide whether it could be sold or whether it was in the public domain. And then take the film back to Zapruder’s house and give it back to him. That way, the only thing they could get him for was assault because he would have returned Zapruder’s property. Rather said, ‘Great idea. I’ll do it.’ I hadn’t hung up the phone maybe ten seconds when it hit me: What in the hell did you just do? Are you out of your mind? So I called Rather back. Luckily, he was still there, and I said to him, ‘For Christ’s sake, don’t do what I just told you to. I think this day has gotten to me and thank God I caught you before you left.’ Knowing Dan to be as competitive as I am, I had the feeling that he wished he’d left before the second phone call.”

from the funny-how-that-works dept

We've noted for a long time now that copyright laws are regularly used as a tool for censorship. In Russia, abusing copyright law for censorship and to harass political opponents has become standard. Remember how the Russian government teamed up with Microsoft to use questionable copyright claims to intimidate government critics? And then how the MPAA gleefully got into bed with Russia's media censor to celebrate copyright? Of course, Russia also expanded its ability to use copyright to censor the internet, following pressure from short-sighted US diplomats, demanding that Russia better "respect" copyright laws.

And now it's resulting in the taking down of an entire news site. As TorrentFreak reports, news site Story-media.ru does appear to have copied a full article from a popular Russian news site Gazeta. That's certainly an issue, but because of that single copied article, combined with the use of anonymizing the WHOIS record, a Moscow court has ordered the entire site blocked. Think about that for a second and recognize how copyright can be used to shut down an entire publication. Now some will argue that they wouldn't have any problem if they hadn't copied that article, but copyright is one of those things that basically everyone infringes on eventually. If you don't expect this process to be abused to shut down press that powerful individuals in Russia don't like, then you haven't been paying much attention.

from the sony-hack-redux dept

As you almost certainly know by now, on Friday Wikileaks released a bunch of hacked DNC emails just before the Democratic Presidential convention kicked off. While Wikileaks hasn't quite said where it got the emails, speculation among many quickly pointed to Russian state sponsored hackers. That's because of the revelation last month of two sets of hackers breaching the DNC's computer system and swiping (at the very least) opposition research on Donald Trump. Various cybersecurity research firms, starting with CrowdStrike, which was hired by the DNC to investigate, pointed the finger at the Russians.

Of course, whether or not you believe that may depend on how credible you find the big cybersecurity firms like CrowdStrike, FireEye and Mandiant (the big names that always pop up in situations like this). For what it's worth, these guys have something of a vested interest in playing up the threat of big hacks from nation-state level hackers. For a good analysis of why this finger-pointing may be less than credible, I recommend two articles by Jeffrey Carr, one noting that these firms come from a history of "faith-based attribution" whereby they are never held accountable for being wrong -- and another highlighting serious questions about the designation of Russia as being responsible for this particular hack (he notes that some of the research appeared to come pre-arrived at that conclusion, and then ignored any evidence to the contrary).

Still, the claim that the data came from the Russians has become something of a story itself. And, of course, who did the hack and got the info is absolutely a news story. But it's an entirely separate one from whether or not the leaked emails contain anything useful or newsworthy. And yet, because this is the peak of political silly season, some are freaking out and claiming that anyone reporting on these emails "has been played" by Putin and Russia. Leaving aside the fact that people like to claim that Russia's behind all sorts of politicians that some don't like, that should be entirely unrelated to whether or not the story is worth covering.

And yet, we already have stories arguing that "Putin weaponized Wikileaks to influence" the US election. That's ridiculous on multiple levels. Wikileaks releases all kinds of stuff, whether you agree with them or not. And the idea that this will actually impact the election seems... unlikely. Is the (not at all surprising) fact that the DNC is fully of cronyism and favoritism really suddenly going to shift voters to Trump? Of course, Wikileaks implicitly threatening someone with legal action for saying there's a connection between Russia and Wikileaks is pretty ridiculous as well.

To some extent, this reminds me of some people who freaked out over the Sony Pictures hack, a while back. There the culprit blamed was North Korea, a claim that at least many people remained skeptical of. But, even so, there were some (including Sony) who tried to argue that no one should report on the contents of the emails because it would somehow support the North Korean regime's goals.

That's laughable.

Yes, whoever is behind such hacks is a story. But it does nothing to lessen or impact whether or not the leaked emails themselves are newsworthy. Arguing against anyone publishing stories about them just because they may have begun with Russian hackers is just a way of desperately trying to block embarrassing stories about the DNC from getting published.